Tuesday, 3 April 2012

Guess when I tweeted my papers? Top ten downloaded papers from my department in the last year, 7 of which include me in the author list.

In October 2011 I began a project to make all of my 26 articles published in refereed journals available via UCL's Open Access Repository - "Discovery". I decided that as well as putting them in the institutional repository, I would write a blog post about each research project, and tweet the papers for download. Would this affect how much my research was read, known, discussed, distributed?

Some rough stats, first of all. Most of my papers, before I blogged and tweeted them, had one to two downloads, even if they had been in the repository for months (or years, in some cases). Upon blogging and tweeting, within 24 hours, there were on average seventy downloads of my papers. Seventy. Now, this might not be internet meme status, but that's a huge leap in interest. Most of the downloads followed the trajectory I described with the downloads to Digital Curiosities, in that there would be a peak of interest, then a long tail after. I believe that the first spike of interest from people clicking the link that flies by them on twitter (which was sometimes retweeted) is then replaced by a gradual trickle of visitors from postings on other blogs, and the fact that the very blog posts about the papers make them more findable when the subject is googled. People read the blog posts - I have about 2000 visitors here a month, 70% new, with an average time on the site of 1 minute and 5 seconds. You come here and tend to read what I have written (thanks!) and seem to be clicking and downloading my research papers.

The image above shows the top ten papers downloaded from my entire department over the last year. There were a total of 6172 downloads from our department (UCL Department of Information Studies is one of the leading iSchools in the UK). Look at the spikes. That's where I blog and tweet about my research. I'm not the only person producing research in my department (I think there are 18 current members of staff and a further 20 or so who have moved on but still have items in the institutional repository, but I'm the only person who has gone the whole hog on promoting their research like this). You will see that 7 out of 10 of the most downloaded papers from my Department in the last calendar year have me in the author list. As a clue, I dont know anything about Uganda, e-books, or classification in public libraries. 27 out of the top 50 downloads in our department in the last calendar year feature me (as a rough guide, I get about 1/3 of the entire downloads for my department). My stuff isn't better than my colleagues' work. They're all doing wonderful things! But I'm just the only one actively promoting access to my research papers. If you tell people about your research, they look at it. Your research will get looked at more than papers which are not promoted via social media.

Some obvious points and conclusions. Don't tweet things at midnight, you'll get half the click throughs you get through the day when people are online. Don't tweet important things on a Friday, especially not late - people do take weekends and you can see a clear drop off in downloads when the weekend rolls around and your paper falls a bit flat, as you sent it on its way on social media at the wrong time. The best time is between 11am and 5pm GMT, Monday to Thursday in a working week. I have the stats here somewhere to prove it. I wont write it up, though, as its pretty predictable (you would think! But somehow the message doesn't get through to people that just putting it on twitter isnt enough, you have to time it right. The Discovery twitter account regularly posts an automated list of the really interesting things people have been looking at... at 10pm on a Friday night. Sheesh. I only know as I'm regularly sad enough to still be on twitter at that time, but I suspect if they tweeted the papers through the day during the working week... well, you guess what would happen?)

The paper that really flew - Digital Curiosities - has now been downloaded over a thousand times in the past year. It was the 16th most downloaded paper from our entire institutional repository in the final quarter of 2011, and the 3rd most downloaded paper in UCL's entire Arts Faculty in the past year. It's all relative really - what does this really mean? Well, I can tell you that this paper was the most downloaded paper in 2011 in LLC Journal, where it was published (and where it lives behind a paywall apart from being available free from Discovery). LLC is the most prestigious journal in the discipline I operate in, Digital Humanities. The entire download count for this paper from LLC itself, which made it top paper last year? 376 full text downloads. There have been almost 3 times that number of downloads from our institutional repository. What does this mean? What can we extrapolate from this? I think its fair to say: It's a really good thing to make your work open access. More people will read it than if it is behind a paywall. Even if it is the most downloaded paper from a journal in your field, Open Access makes it even more accessed.

I cant know if the downloaded papers are read though, can I? The only way to do so is to enter the murky world of citation analysis. The trouble with this is the proof of the pudding will come to light in a few years time - if someone reads something of mine now and decides to cite it, its going to take 1 or even 2 years - or more - for it to appear in my citation list. So, I'll be keeping an eye on things, not too seriously as we all know things like H index are problematic. Just for the record, at time of writing, I have 218 citations, according to Google scholar. My H index is 8, and my i10 index is 5, which is ok for a relatively young Humanities scholar (I'm still technically an Early Career Researcher for another year, as defined by the UK funding councils). Digital Curiosities only has 3 published citations to date. 3 published citations. Remember, it's been downloaded over 1300 times, between LLC and our repository. Will this citation count grow? Will I be able to demonstrate, over the next few years, that retweeting leads to citation? Will I be able to tell how people came across my research - if they come across my research? We'll see. Dont worry, I'll blog it if I have anything to say on this.

I also know nothing about how many times my other papers are downloaded from the websites of published journals, or consulted in print in the Library. The latter, no-one can really say about - but the former? It seems strange to me that we write articles (without being paid) and we get them published by people who make a profit on them, then we don't even know - usually - how many downloads they are getting from the journals themselves. The only reason I know about the LLC statistics is because I am good friends with the Editor. So, there are obvious advantages to being able to monitor my own downloads from my institutional repository. Its been a surprise to me to see what papers of mine are of interest to others. (Should that drive my research direction, though?)

The final point to make is that people don't just follow me or read my blog to download my research papers. This has only been part of what I do online - I have more than 2000 followers on twitter now and it has taken me over 3 years of regular engagement - hanging out and chatting, pointing to interesting stuff, repointing to interesting stuff, asking questions, answering questions, getting stroppy, sending supportive comments, etc - to build up an "audience" (I'd actually call a lot of you friends!) If all I was doing was pumping out links to my published stuff would you still be reading this? Would you have read this? Would you keep reading? My blog is similar: sure, I've talked about my research, but I also post a variety of other content, some silly, some serious, as part of my academic work. I suspect this little experiment only worked as I already had a "digital presence" whatever that may mean. Thanks for putting up with me. All these numbers, these stats. Those clicks were made by real people. Thanks!

So that would be my conclusion, really. If you want people to find and read your research, build up a digital presence in your discipline, and use it to promote your work when you have something interesting to share. It's pretty darn obvious, really:

What next? From now on, I will definitely post anything I publish straight into our institutional repository, and blog and tweet it straight away. After all, the time it takes to undertake research, and write research papers, and see them through to publication is large: the time is takes to blog or tweet about them is negligible. This has been a retrospective journey for me, through my past research, at a time when I came back from a period of leave. It's been fun to get my act together like this - in general I needed to sort out my online systems at UCL, so it gave me some impetus to do so. But it has shown me that making your research available puts it out there - and as soon as I have something new to show you, you'll be the first to know.

And here are a list of my personal top downloaded items from our repository, with download count since October, when I started this. Just for your eyes only, you understand.

About Melissa Terras

I'm the Professor of Digital Humanities in the Department of Information Studies, University College London, and Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities. I teach Digitisation, and my research focuses on the use of computational techniques to enable research in the humanities that would otherwise be impossible. My UCL webpage contains more information about publications and research projects. I also hang out at @melissaterras. This was my personal blog, and everything I said here was in a personal capacity - you can find my new blog over at melissaterras.org. I'm preserving this content to prevent bit rot, but its all replicated over the road, too - hope to see you there.